One would like to be grand and heroic, if one could; but if not, why try at all? One wants to be very something, very great, very heroic; or if not that, then at least very stylish and very fashionable. It is this everlasting mediocrity that bores me

It's a matter of taking the side of the weak against the strong, something the best people have always done

The bitterest tear shed over graves are for words left unsaid and deeds left undone

Friendships are discovered rather than made

Home is a place not only of strong affections, but of entire unreserved; it is life's undress rehearsal, its backroom, its dressing room, from which we go forth to more careful and guarded intercourse, leaving behind...cast-off and everyday clothing

I am speaking now of the highest duty we owe our friends, the noblest, the most sacred - that of keeping their own nobleness, goodness, pure and incorrupt

When you get into a tight place and everything goes against you, till it seems as though you could not hold on a minute longer, never give up then, for that is just the place and time that the tide will turn

If it were admitted that the great object is to read and enjoy a language, and the stress of the teaching were placed on the few things absolutely essential to this result, all might in their own way arrive there, and rejoice in its flowers

No one is so thoroughly superstitious as the godless man